Oracle Blog

Oracle Hardware

Wednesday Mar 19, 2014

Having been working in the IT industry for 27 years, I’ve seen my share of outrageous vendor claims. In fact, it is one my biggest pet peeves about our industry. How many times have you seen XYZ vendor claiming their solution is “industry leading”, “best-in-class”, “world class” or “leading edge” without providing any empirical evidence to back up that claim. Worse yet, I’ve seen claims (from vendors not to be mentioned here) of 3x, 4x or 10x faster, bigger, or otherwise “better” than the competition with no report, benchmark test or third-party source credited. It happens all the time and it begs the question, if it comes from the vendor, not an independent third party, why would a potential customer believe it?

DCIG uses a rigorous 8-step evaluation process to arrive at
their recommendation(s).This year, DCIG
evaluated 42 tape libraries from eight different vendors and classified them into five
categories:

Best-in-class (bestowed upon a single product)

Recommended

Excellent

Good

Basic

I
particularly like the DCIG analysis because it makes a strong effort to
evaluate its subject matter from the perspective of the customer. As stated in the report’s executive summary,
the DCIG 2014 Big Data Tape Library Buyer's Guide accomplishes the following
objectives:

Provides an
objective, third-party evaluation of tape libraries that weights, scores and
ranks their features from an end-user’s viewpoint

Scores and
ranks the features on each tape library based upon criteria that matter most to
end-users, so they can quickly know which tape libraries are the most
appropriate for them to use and under what conditions”

So, if you
want the inside scoop from an independent third-party on why the Oracle
StorageTek SL8500 was ranked the #1 Big Data tape library and superior to
offerings from IBM, HP, and Spectra Logic, then click here.